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From: J Chapman Flack <flack@cs.purdue.edu>
Subject: Parser/lexer generator ANTLR
Date: 1999/02/17
Message-ID: <36CB37AB.2313@cs.purdue.edu>#1/1
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Organization: Purdue University
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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1999-02-17T00:00:00+00:00
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Hello,

I'm not a c.l.ada regular, but Markus Kuhn suggested I post something
about
ANTLR in case it could be of interest.  ANTLR (ANother Tool for Language
Recognition)
is a pretty mature (in use for much of this decade) free, open-source
parser and
lexer generator with built-in support for building abstract syntax trees
and "tree
parsers" that apply transformations to them.

ANTLR itself is implemented in Java but produces parsers and lexers in
any language
supported by a backend.  The backends currently included produce Java,
C++, HTML
(for documentation of grammars), and "Diagnostics" (for detailed
dissection of grammars).
A graphical (Java Swing) "ParseView" debugger is included for exploring
the parser's
operation visually.

I don't know what parser/lexer tools are already available in the Ada
community
but writing an Ada backend to plug into ANTLR ought to be a reasonable
project
if anyone is interested.  The ANTLR home page is http://www.antlr.org/

Cheers,
Chapman Flack,  Purdue University
"just a recent jumper-on to the ANTLR bandwagon"

> You might want to announce this project on comp.lang.ada, because there
> might be enthusiastic volunteers out there who would be willing to add
> an Ada95 backend as well. (Ada95: faster than Java and safer than C++.)
> Markus